Free The Serpent Mage by Greg Bear Page A

the wind-sound.

    Something was very definitely going to happen. Whether he was prepared or not, Michael didn't know, but he was expectant, almost eager.
    "Come and get me," he said, and then felt a chill. But stay away from those I love .
    Even at this hour, the city lights were a wonder and a glory. Ranks of orange streetlights marched off to the horizon. High-rise towers, far off in the clear night air, offered random glowing floors as cleaning crews finished their night's work.
    People.
    His kind.
    Shitting on floors.
    Dreaming, growing old or sleeping in cribs with developing minds dreaming feverishly of vague infant things; working late into the morning or tossing restlessly, coming up out of slumber into an awareness of the imminent day; maybe somewhere someone killing a person, an animal, an insect, someone killing himself; someone being born; someone realizing inadequacies, or preparing breakfast for the early-risers; sleeping off a drunk or making early morning love; tossing through insomnia. Mourning a loved one. Waiting for the night to be over.
    Just sleeping.
    Just sleeping.
    Just sleeping.
    Unaware.
    Having lived all their lives in the midst of mind-silence, in the midst of stolid and infinitely detailed reality. Never knowing anything of their distant past except perhaps through vague racial memories, bubbling up as fantasy or delusion.
    Hoping for magic and change; hoping desperately for escape; or simply clinging, unable to imagine something beyond. Once in, never out, except through the black hole of death.
    "Jesus," he whispered on the deck above the city and the hills. His mind was racing toward a precipice.
    Every little fractured emotion, every grand exaltation, all bred of Earth and nurtured by Earth and all without the compensation of what Michael had experienced, the true and undeniable awareness of another reality, another history and truth to match the grandest fantasies…
    His neck-hair rose again. Some of the music he had felt through his skin one floor below had insinuated itself through the building and found him again. A high, piercing chord of horns and strings blowing and bowing without relenting, a note of intermingled doom and hope (how was that possible?) conveying an
    emotion unfelt for ages
    Michael began to shake
    the emotion that was the grandfather of all emotions, from which all human feelings had been struck off like shards from a flint core.
    Michael heard a voice in his mind, neither Death's Radio nor Arno Waltiri, a voice he did not recognize, very old, conveying the word Preeda
    that was its name, the emotion that burned inside of him, threatened to burn him hollow; the only true emotion, foreign to the Sidhefor sixty million years and almost lost to humans.
    Michael reveled in the sudden breaking of the mind-silence, and simultaneously a muscle-twitching terror infused him through the burning Preeda .
    Soon we will meet , the ancient voice conveyed.
    Earth's silence had been broken.
    Michael saw mapped across the back of his brain an infinity of shining scales and dark, murky water.
    "Enough!" he screamed out across the city. "Please! Enough!"
    The building became as dead and silent as the rest of the Earth.
    Michael gulped back saliva to soothe his raw throat and wiped the flood of wetness from his cheeks and eyes. He might be hoarse for a week. Certainly he would be hoarse when he met Kristine Pendeers to show her the manuscript…
    Everyday was back. Thoughts, concerns, schedules, plans.
    Preeda was gone, but where it had been, its track was clear. And he had brought it on himself, by concentrating on the city and the people — the humans — living in it, by concentrating on their situation and breaking through to some sort of understanding.
    The dissonant chord of homs and strings had also pushed.
    Hopkins was waiting for him in the lobby, sitting on the top of the counter, heels kicking at the torn upholstery. "See any spooks?' he asked.

    Michael shook his head.
    "Find